It's Tuesday. Why Not Post Some Sad Paleography News.

King’s College London has proposed cutting its paleography program (paleography is the deciphering and reading of historical manuscripts) and eliminating its Chair of Paleography, which is the only chair in the subject in the English-speaking world. Why should we care? First because, as a medievalist friend put it, “Working on manuscripts is at the very core of medieval history.” Britain is slashing nine hundred and fifteen million pounds from higher education over the next three years, and the paleography program is just one victim. On a symbolic level, it seems the most significant: historical manuscripts are not just primary sources, they are the source—the final material link (with art and architecture) to our intellectual past. That they will all inevitably be digitized, sent into the cloud, and parsed by the hive is little consolation—no more than what would be offered by a digital photo of Chartres cathedral. As my medievalist friend and I learned the year we took an introductory paleography course together, the ability to read a manuscript written in medieval Latin has basically nothing to do with the ability to read medieval Latin. Scribes throughout history, always pressed for space on their costly parchment, evolved a complex system of abbreviation—much, much more complex than OMG and LOL (you can see a bit of what I mean here). We couldn’t have begun to decipher the documents without a teacher. Even with a teacher, it was hard work, made more tedious by the fact that transcriptions and translations of many of the manuscripts were readily available. So why do it? Why suffer for this sort of knowledge? Especially if it’s not a field you’re going to end up working in?

Because things that matter—in this case, our textual inheritance—are worth suffering for. And because, once you’ve suffered through something like that, you inevitably emerge telling everyone that in fact you find it fun. Just like a new mother, who forgets the pain of childbirth mere seconds after the fact (or so I hear)…